A speech by Eric Davis held on the opening of the Net_life-Indra_Net Exhibition at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in:

” […] One of the things I talk about in TechGnosis is that every time there is a new information technology that enters a big way – telegraph, radio, television even – there is this big explosion of utopian expectations, some apocalyptic fears, ideas of new healing forces. There is always a margin or fringe of these eruptions of mythology and mystical and religious yearnings.

What I really like about the “HEALING MACHINE” is that it hooks up our contemporary obsession with information and the idea that information networks will in some ways magically heal all the problems of the world and our own sense of psychic fragmentation and our own confusion in the midst of too much information. And it hooks it up with an older enthusiasm, which was the enthusiasm for electricity. Because in many ways, our enthusiasm for data now is like the enthusiasm for electricity one hundret, one hundret and fifty years ago, when electricity was seen as this panacea, as genuine healing agent. And a tremedous amount of occult energy grew up around the ideas of electricity.

I think this parallels are very, very strong. The fact that our whole technological civilisation rests on top of electricity and electromagnetism – we forget this, because we are so used to it now. It is in the background of our minds. Only when there is a power outage we do ever even realise: oh yes! This whole thing exists because of electricity. And yet when electricity was just beeing discovered, it was amazing! It was this incredible cosmic force, no one understood how it exactly works for many, many decades, even as we built contraptions. They really didn´t have a full working theory of it. So it was really this powerful kind of energy that drew all of these different cultural stories. I think in many ways, we still dont´t what we are doing with information networks. We don´t know what it means to saturate our lives and our civlisation with these increasingly intelligent data processing machines. So there is this kind of intensity around it, and there is this sense that there is a potential for a kind of healing – both in information and with ekectricity. So I really like the way that that piece kind of opens that up.[…]”